Health care disparities in rural areas remain significant in the U.S. health care industry. Uncompensated care makes health care disparities in rural areas worse, and rural hospitals are unfavorably positioned to compete with urban hospitals in the economic-downturn marketplace. How uncompensated care affects quality care among rural hospitals has been lightly investigated. Given that many rura...

Traditionally, urban analysis has been quick to adopt and benefit from developments in technology (e.g., microcomputer, GIS) and techniques (e.g., statistics, mathematical programming). This has not been the case, however, with newer methods of spatial analysis – in particular, spatial statistics. Only recently has this situation started to change. This paper documents the confluence of spatial...

This study explores the combined application of remote sensing, spatial metrics and spatial modeling to the analysis and modeling of urban growth in Santa Barbara, California. The investigation is based on a 72-year time series data set compiled from interpreted historical aerial photography and from IKONOS satellite imagery. Spatial metrics were used both specifically to assess the impact of u...

The responsiveness of labor demand and unemployment to growth is an issue of ongoing political and academic interest. Economic growth is supposed to be the key to increase labor demand and reduce unemployment. Departing from Okun’s and Verdoorn’s law, most research on the (un)employment intensity of growth has focused on national disparities and the role of labor market institutions. Empirical ...

BACKGROUND The population of Ghana is increasingly becoming urbanized with about 70% of the estimated 27 million people living in urban and peri-urban areas. Nonetheless, eight out of the ten regions in Ghana remain predominantly rural where only 32% of the national health sector workforce works. Moreover, the rural-urban disparities in the density of health tutors (staff responsible for pre-se...

the theory of natural movement was developed by hillier and hanson at 1984 and investigates the relation between social and spatial forms. hillier believes that space is the key aspect of how social and cultural worlds are made in the real world. hillier claims that social and spatial forms follow such a consistent pattern that spatial configuration determines social patterns such as land-use a...

Economic disparities between the regions of the European Union are of constant concern both for policy and economic research. In this paper we examine whether there are overlapping trends of regional development in the EU: overall convergence on the one hand and persistent or even increasing spatial concentration (agglomeration) on the other. Kernel density estimation, Markov chain analysis and...